By Julie Jargon
It turns out consumers weren't too satisfied with Burger King
Worldwide Inc.'s Satisfries.
The fast-food chain Wednesday said it is dropping from its U.S.
menus the lower calorie French fries it introduced with much
fanfare less than a year ago.
The Miami company had been trying to reach consumers who had cut
back on French fry orders because of health concerns. The fries,
which were made with a less-porous batter that didn't absorb as
much oil during frying, were marketed as containing 20% fewer
calories and 25% less fat than Burger King's classic fries, and 30%
fewer calories and 40% less fat than McDonald's fries. The smallest
portion of Satisfries contained 190 calories.
Burger King continued selling its regular fries, but trumpeted
the new version when it started selling them last September,
calling Satisfries "one of the biggest fast food launches."
Burger King on Wednesday said that it always intended to let
customers determine how long Satisfries stayed on the menu. When
franchise owners of its 7,500 North American restaurants were given
the option of continuing to offer Satisfries earlier this week,
owners of just 2,500 restaurants decided to do so. "The remaining
restaurants will treat the product as a limited time menu offering
and have begun phasing it out after this unprecedented run," Burger
King North America President Alex Macedo said in a statement.
The Satisfries flop comes at a time when Americans generally
have been eating fewer potatoes--long a mainstay of the national
diet--in part because the tubers are seen as unhealthy, and
companies such as Burger King have been seeking new ways to keep
sales of spud products growing.
The failed fries experiment also speaks to the fickle and
sometimes confusing nature of Americans when it comes to more
healthful eating. Food makers trying to cater to health trends
often have found that consumers don't react favorably when they
know their favorite indulgences have changed. That has led
companies to take a stealthy approach to reformulating products.
Boston Market, for example, reduced the sodium content of menu
items without telling customers.
When McDonald's first announced in 2002 that it would start
cooking its famous French fries in oil free of trans fats, its
customer-service lines were flooded with complaints about the fries
tasting different, even in cities where nothing had yet changed. It
took another six years for McDonald's to settle on a canola-oil
blend that tasted right.
This isn't the first time Burger King has tinkered
unsuccessfully with its fries. In the late 1990s, Burger King
altered its French fry recipe, but customers didn't like the new
version. The chain changed the formula in 2001 and again in
2011.
Write to Julie Jargon at julie.jargon@wsj.com
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